In anticipation of Friday’s presidential election, Iran’s leadership has harshly cracked down on journalists, dissidents, and cyber activists, as well as members of their families. The regime is leaving nothing to chance, determined to avoid a replay of the surprise demonstrations that followed the 2009 presidential election and led to …
The Obama Administration’s “culture of intimidation,” as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–KY) has called it, has affected the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). In a power grab that is as outrageous as it is brazen, the Obama Administration is proposing to replace the only remaining Republican and one of …
The fired journalists of Radio Liberty’s (RL) Moscow office are finally seeing a deep injustice reversed. Following a visit to Moscow, Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) members Susan McCue and Michael Meehan announced: Given the rapidly shrinking independent media across Russia over the past few months, we have asked the …
The treatment inflicted on 41 Russian journalists in Moscow’s Radio Liberty office is nothing less than scandalous, and it threatens to silence American broadcasting into Russia for good. But what is even more scandalous is that it was not the Russian government that, without warning, shut those journalists out of …
Don’t say the wheels of government always spin slowly. When there is an agenda at work, they can move with considerable speed, and in the deconstruction of American overseas broadcasting, things are moving fast. Consider a new feasibility study completed on November 10 regarding a merger of three major entities …
In the age of media saturation and extravagant federal budget deficits, the question does comes up: Why does the United States need to spend some $750 million on international broadcasting every year? As with every taxpayer dollar spent, this question deserves an answer, and rarely has a more eloquent one …
The new Broadcasting Board of Governors, announced on Friday by the Obama White House, have their work cut out for them. For a variety of not very satisfactory reasons, the U.S. broadcasting entities (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, et al.) on whom the federal government spends $745 million a …
Well into the second year of the Obama administration, U.S. international broadcasting services remain in a leaderless state of vacuum. Nor are these important public diplomacy assets of the government likely to emerge from limbo anytime soon, which is deeply unfortunate given the intensifying global competition for information dominance. At …
On September 30, 2009, The Heritage Foundation hosted “The Year of Miracles: The Fall of the Berlin Wall Twentieth Anniversary.” A reoccurring theme of the event centered on America’s use of government-sponsored broadcasting and its effects on U.S. influence during the Cold War and how it must be used today. …
